svn as change management toos?

["Langjahr, Uwe" <uw...@hp.com>]

Hello,
I thing this is a newbie question?
I want use subversion (svn) to maintain host configuration files 
(e.g. /etc/hosts) under a perspective of change management to 
track the changes in this files.
If I put this files under version control and check-in them after a 
modification, I can use the logging as documentation, fine. I know who to
implement this with svn.
 
But in my example scenario:
- several unix host (e.g: 10)
- each system has the same /etc/nsswich.conf
  I want to share this file over all system and use svn as rollout tool
  (Modify, check-in, check-out on all hosts)
- each system has an individual /etc/hosts
  Every file from every system should be under control.
 
I was able to implement this scenario with svn in the
following directory structure:
  common:
    /etc/nsswitch.conf
    /etc/hosts   (a master example)
  specific:
    hostA:
      /etc/hosts
    hostB:
      /etc/hosts
 
To setup the workcopy (wc), I have done the following logical steps:
1.) svn checkout .../common to /etc (wc)
2.) svn copy .../common/etc/hosts .../specific/hostA/etc/hosts
3.) svn switch /etc/hosts .../specific/hostA/etc/hosts
4.) Edit /etc/hosts, check-in, check-out works fine, this changes has
    only influence to this host
5.) Edit /etc/nsswitch.conf, check-in, check-out on other hosts reflect
    the change on every host, fine.
(Sorry, I have done all this steps with TortoiseSVN, so the list above is
a logical sequence and hope this reflect my steps).
 
My main questions:
  - Is this a good way to implement my requirement.
    It's a complex setup and I need a concept who to organize the repository.
  - Has somebody a better/easier way/idea to implement the scenario
  - If I loose the svn meta-directory (.svn), I must know, that I
    first have to checkout the common tree and than "overlay" the
    specific host with it's specific changes from specific directory. 
    I think this is easy to script, if the concept about the 
    respository organization is done
 
Thanks for reading this and I hope you can understand my question.
Uwe


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Re: svn as change management toos?

[Bob Proulx <bo...@proulx.com>]

Langjahr, Uwe wrote:
> I want use subversion (svn) to maintain host configuration files 
> (e.g. /etc/hosts) under a perspective of change management to 
> track the changes in this files.

This question gets discussed every so often on different lists.
Personally I don't prefer to use subversion for direct management of
/etc although others probably do.  I would use something like radmin
or cfengine for this task.  (Actually I use custom scripts but they
are not in any shape for sharing.)

Here are some interesting references for further reading.

  http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/04/15/cfengine.html
  http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/05/13/distributed_cfengine.html
  http://radmind.org/

If you want further discussion on this topic then I suggest that the
infrastructures mailing list would be a better forum than the
subversion list.  It is not really a subversion topic.  Check out the
archives of the infrastructure list.  Good stuff there.

  http://mailman.terraluna.org/mailman/listinfo/infrastructures

Bob

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